1. Technical Field
The disclosure generally relates to the electronic display of documents. More particularly, the disclosure relates to the placement and use of ink and annotations in electronically displayed documents.
2. Related Art
Many factors today drive the development of computers and computer software. One of these factors is the desire to provide accessibility to information virtually anytime and anywhere. The proliferation of notebook computers, personal digital assistants (PDAs), and other personal electronic devices reflect the fact that users want to be able to access information wherever they may be, whenever they want. In order to facilitate greater levels of information accessibility, the presentation of information must be made gas familiar and comfortable as possible.
In this vein, one way to foster success of electronic presentations of information will be to allow users to handle information in a familiar manner. Stated another way, the use and manipulation of electronically-presented information may mimic those paradigms that users are most familiar with, e.g., printed documents, as an initial invitation to their use. As a result, greater familiarity between users and their “machines” will be engendered, thereby fostering greater accessibility, even if the machines have greater capabilities and provide more content to the user beyond the user's expectations. Once users feel comfortable with new electronic presentations, they will be more likely to take advantage of an entire spectrum of available functionality.
One manner of encouraging familiarity is to present information in an electronic book format in which a computer displays information in a manner that closely resembles printed books. In order to more completely mimic a printed book, users will need to have the ability to make textual notes to themselves, akin to writing in the margins of paper books. Users will also want to highlight selected portions, as these are active-reading activities of which a user would expect to see in an electronic book. Users will want to add drawings, arrows, underlining, strike-throughs, and the like, also akin to writing in paper books. Finally, users will want to add bookmarks.
The above-identified so-called “active-reading” activities are available. In the case of any computer application with GUI that displays text, it can be assumed that the displayed text is of primary significance to the user. If the process of adding ink-marks to the primary text negatively impacts the presentation of the primary text, then the user is unlikely to frequently ink-annotate the electronic information and/or is unlikely to have a satisfactory ink-annotation experience. As a result, the perception of electronic books (or e-Books) as a step forward from paper books will suffer. What is needed is a mechanism to enhance the e-Book ink-annotation feature to match or surpass a similar experience with paper books.
Handwriting, scribbling, and marking on text are the most highly developed skills humans have for capturing short and graphical comments on documents. Only when computers can support these activities can they match the handiness of paper. Handwriting need not be recognized by the computer in order to be useful. But, it must be applicable wherever one could expect to be able to handwrite on a displayed document page. The writing should be visible without requiring any additional obstruction of the document, and without requiring any change to the layout of the document. Known methods for annotating documents fall short of these goals. Further, always associating an annotation with a singular element (a given page, for example) may create difficulties in rendering when re-flowing the text of a document. These difficulties include rending the annotation on a page different from the original subject of the annotation.